About

We are two moms with young children who have been searching for a way to make flying more relaxing for our children (and thus, for us parents!). While airplanes have been offering more entertainment options for kids, the comfort of the seats has not improved much and it can be difficult for kids to sleep for long periods of time. Thus, we developed Fly-Tot.

Fly-Tot is an inflatable cushion that allows your little ones to lay down flat on a regular, economy class seat. We see two ways to use it. If you have one child, the illustration below shows how the Fly-Tot can be used. The child sleeps lying flat, but the legs may be slightly bent.

Fly-Tot with one child

If you have two kids, put two Fly-Tots side-by-side and they can sleep with their legs stretched out.

Two kids with two Fly-Tots

We believe Fly-Tot is a useful product for parents that travel with children. The goal is to provide a low cost, convenient solution for the kids to get some sleep on the plane.

Size/Weight: The current prototype weighs around 2 lbs or 900g. When rolled up, it is roughly a cylinder that is 4" in diameter and 10" long. We are hoping that when we go to production, the real product can be slightly lighter and folds a bit smaller.

Funding: To go from the current prototype stage to production, we need two things: 1.) The current prototypes are made manually by our vendor, but that is very expensive. We need tooling to automate the production. 2.) The pumps that are on the market today are not ideal. Either they are designed for air mattresses and therefore too big and bulky, or they are designed for toys/bicycle tires and pump too slowly. We want to develop a pump that is light, battery powered, and can pump up the Fly-Tot quickly.

Risks and challenges

We have made several prototypes of the Fly-Tot and we feel confident that we can make it work. Timing can potentially be a challenge and if there are unforeseen issues with our current vendor, we would have to start over.

The pump will be new and we are told that R&D/tooling will take around six months. This is not significantly different from what is on the market and we are simply trying to scale it down.